It all started with a dig.
During a tour of the Linus Tech Tips studio, an employee of the popular tech review channel took a shot at a couple of competitors. “The difference between us and someone like Gamers Nexus or Hardware Unboxed is that we test new components, new tests, every time,” he said.
The two channels named in that comment did not take kindly to the slight, and their reactions have triggered a firestorm of complaints against Linus Media Group. Among other accusations, current and former employees have spoken up about a “grindset” culture that prioritized regular uploads over the mental health of content producers.
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Of the two channels cited by the Linus Tech Tips employee, Hardware Unboxed responded first. “If you have to tell everyone how good your testing is, in my 20+ years of experience that generally means your testing isn’t very good,” reads a post on the channel’s X account.
Gamers Nexus added more fuel to the firestorm with a long-form critique of Linus Tech Tips’ methods. The 44-minute video provides several examples of instances when the desire to churn out videos superseded the quality of those videos. Most notably, Gamers Nexus criticized the Linus Tech Tips review of a copper pipe water cooler prototype from Billet Labs. Channel founder Linus Sebastian gave the product a negative review after erroneously fitting it to an incompatible GPU.
To make amends, Linus Tech Tips is taking a week off from uploads. During that hiatus, the channel will implement “long-term workflow changes,” according to its CFO Yvonne Ho. “It’s going to be a long week of not making videos,” added Head of Labs Gary Key.
“We are going through some growing pains – we’ve been very public about them in the interest of transparency – and it’s clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication,” Sebastian said in a mea culpa of his own. “We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but that’s no excuse for sloppiness.”
The issues with Linus Tech Tips do not seem to be limited to workflow. In a long thread, former channel employee Madison Reeve described a workplace filled with threats, intimidation, inappropriate sexual comments, and corporate inaction. “There is a system of micro-managing and a level of distrust because the amount of content they have to push out daily is so insane, no one gets a break,” Reeve wrote. “This no days off, ‘grindset’ culminated in the real moment I realized I had to leave.”
Terren Tong, who replaced Sebastian as Linus Media Group CEO earlier this year, told Kotaku that his team will bring in an outside investigator to look into Reeve’s claims. With the way things are going at Linus Tech Tips HQ, one wonders how Sebastian feels about his decision to turn down a $100 million CAD offer for his YouTube network.
